Parenting This Sobriety Baby Is A Real Bitch

Sometimes I feel like someone just picked me up from one place and time and plopped me down someplace else.

This feeling denotes a laziness in my character. It's a deflection of the acknowledgement of my responsibility in the stream of my own life.

This is my friend, Starcat, with whom we visited in Saskatoon last weekend.

I always feel like this after I visit my hometown of Saskatoon. I drove away one day, got married just outside Regina Beach, and then drove on to my new city and my new married life in Regina.

This is an old roommate of mine from the late 1990s.

I was in one place with one life one day, and then I was in another place with another life another day.

Mary!

The older I get, the more I feel like a time traveller. I travel back through memory so easily, so completely, that I often forget that I am 38. I think this is why I struggle with my age sometimes. My sense of narrative leaps around from period to period.

Maybe if I stopped dragging myself through my past so often, I might learn to step more lightly in the present.

I want to write down my life at five. That was a big year for me. I figured out mortality. I learned that not getting to do what you want right then sometimes means that you will never get to do it. I learned that I could think up my own answers to hard questions.

There was much wearing of the short shorts at the gay pride parade.

My attachment to my hometown seems to have grown over the last year. It surprises me, this heavy affection.

I think this attachment stems from a great, deep, wide, yawning well of regret for how I handled the last ten years of my life. I felt happy. I drank. I felt sad. I drank. I felt bored. I drank. I felt inspired. I drank, and every time I drank, I forgot almost everything.

I barely remember the names of anyone I met over the last ten years, because I was drunk when I was in public seventy-five percent of the time. Hell, I barely remember the names of more than half the people I drank with at that pub I parked my butt in day in and day out.

I drank quite a bit when I lived in Saskatoon, but it didn't hound me then. It didn't interfere too much. At least, it didn't until the last year that I lived there.

When babies dance, the whole world dances.

It's not that times were easier then. They weren't. I am a happier, smarter, and more fulfilled human being now with a partner I would marry again and again and again. There is nothing in my life I would give away at this point.

Except.

She waved like the Queen at everyone within waving distance.

If I could, I would definitely give away the part where I have to be a recovering alcoholic now. I wasn't an alcoholic then. Or rather, I was, but I could still live comfortably inside of the misconception that I was just having fun.

I really did have a lot of fun. It's just that fun wasn't all I was having.

This cat pees in my footwear when I don't let him make beds out of our coats.

I was told this would happen. I was told that I would eventually fall into a sentimental nostalgia about my drinking days and, boy howdy, have I.

I want a beer tonight. No, let me correct that. I want several pints of beer. It doesn't help that all of my dreams last night had me hiding out in backwater pubs snuggling up to pitchers of cheap draft. It sounds sad, but it was also delicious. I woke up feeling ashamed and guilty.

Parenting this sobriety baby is a real bitch. It better get really good grades and do something amazing with its college degree that I can brag about in my elder years, because I feel like I'm doing all the work here.

This is my handsome father.

Tonight, my sobriety is being fed ungodly amounts of double-strong coffee while it feasts its eyes on movies that will totally leach all the cool out of our Netflix recommended movies list.

I wish I could show you the look on the Palinode's face when Netflix tells him that our main interests revolve around Sandra Bullock's early years and mildly homoerotic coming-of-age road trips.